Director and star Isabella Rossellini in the “Hamster” episode of the Sundance Channel series “Mammas.”

Isabella Rossellini looks stunning, even when she dresses up like a toad. And as a spider, and as a wasp and even as a hamster.

She does this in “Mammas,” a serious of shorts which explore the nature of maternal instincts in all sorts of species. Rossellini wrote and directed “Mammas,” which airs on Mother’s Day on the Sundance Channel and sundancechannel.com.

Rossellini, who is famously a daughter, is now something of a student of motherhood: she currently is enrolled in a masters program at Hunter College where she is learning about animal behavior. In “Mammas,” she translates her schoolbooks into art.

Sundance has created a really fun promotion for “Mammas,” a set of a-mom-for-all-occasions Mother’s Day e-cards that range from, “My mom often plays the martyr” to “If you get on her bad side, my mom will eat you alive.”

After attending a luncheon with Rossellini recently, I came to appreciate the way she speaks her mind without coming across as strident or pushy:

She openly discussed why she has shunned plastic surgery, noting both that she has had surgeries to help a bad back and wouldn’t want to choose to go under the knife, and that there is no evidence that plastic surgery does anything to prolong the career of women in Hollywood. When she sees women and men with puffy lips and paralyzed foreheads, she feels sad. “My heart goes out to people who chose to do this. They must be so insecure,” she says.

She says equal opportunity for women does not rely on a husband or partner who helps with the housework but a more respectful government and corporate environment. Why is a business lunch tax-deductible but not child-care costs, she asks? Why do workplaces not offer childcare? “It’s not about the partner,” she says.

She says, “I love feminism! It’s had the same influence on me as my mom and my dad!”

When she, a spokesmodel for Bulgari, visited the factory in Italy to watch how the purses are created, she brought along her maroon $2000 bag and asked an artisan if he could build in a special flap for her iPad. (He said no.)

A woman who devotes her life to learning, values her beauty as she ages, appreciates an expensive bag and loves technology: that’s a hot momma.